Shutting Down
by Gypsy Love
Summary: Ponyboy tries to help Johnny with his being suicidal.


It's such a huge thing, you know? To have both your parents die in a car crash, it's just, it wrenches a hole in the world, and you peer through that hole. I had thought things were rough before, that's what I thought, living on the wrong side of town, getting caught up in all the gang violence, the socs and all that. The things I'd seen, man, I thought life was just about as rough as it could be, but it turns out that I was wrong. You can always be wrong about that.

I knew, because I was more cursed than blessed by being smart and perceptive and aware, I knew that I might never get over this thing, this death of the both of them. I'd go on, I was too young not to, it wasn't that. But from the point of their death I'd always be changed, and I would go on being a different sort of person than I would have been, fearing different things, knowing different things.

I was 14 when they died, I was 14 now. It was a strange age to have that happen, because 14 is when you start to try and pull away from them in more of a real way than before, you need your parents to sort of symbolically die so that you can go on and become an adult. Now they really did die and I never wanted that. That child part of me still needs them now and Soda and Darry are just poor substitutes.

I try to think that we're all gonna die someday, this isn't forever. Me, Darry, Soda, we'll all be dead in a hundred years. So my parents died early, so what? But I could peer into my future and see all the things they wouldn't be there for, my high school graduation, my college graduation, my wedding, the birth of my children, all the things that might happen, little things and enormous things, and they were gonna miss them all.

Things are more precarious now, living on the meager income of Darry and Soda, we have the threat of the state swooping in and taking me and Soda away. That would be lousy, because then we wouldn't be with our surrogate family, our gang. We were just a bunch of screwed up kids, all of us, who only had each other. I didn't want to go to some foster home with middle class parents who looked at me like a low class thug they were helping out. You know, if they took me and Soda, they could just as easily take Johnny. He was the one living with abusive and neglectful alcoholics. He was the one getting beaten every other day.

But Johnny had parents and he never complained so nobody in any sort of authority knew how his life was. Would Johnny want to leave? What would he do in some nice house with nice foster parents trying to get him to talk about all the bad things that happened to him?

There were all kinds of bad things that happened to all of us. What the hell happened to Dally in New York? He talked about it sometimes, and it just made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And Darry? Darry was the most together of all of us, he was smart, a bit of a concrete thinker but he could figure things out, he was a hard worker, but when our parents died all his dreams died with them. College was wrenched away, any hope of a better life was wrenched away because he had to take care of me and Soda, he was too honorable not to.

So here I was, feeling the overwhelming grief of my parents being dead, and feeling the weight of Darry's expectations of me. I was smart enough to do very well in school, but the pressure wasn't helping. Still, how could I let Darry know? He was drowning in his jobs and the bills and trying to keep track of me and Soda, and there was so much trouble all around us and it was so easy to fall into it.

Bad things happened to all of us, but I think the one who was suffering the most was Johnny. A few weeks ago some socs jumped him, but this is the thing. A beating, even a real bad one, shouldn't have affected him quite like this. He was jumpier than ever, he had this way of almost violently flinching away from people if they came at him too fast. And he hadn't ever mentioned wanting to kill himself before this soc thing happened. I wonder what really happened. Something a bit worse than just a beating, I figured.

But I was powerless to help him, what could I do? He wouldn't talk about it, none of us ever talked about it. Good, it's best forgotten, except it wasn't being forgotten. You could see it in his eyes, and you could see it in the way he'd reach for that switchblade of his. And we never talked about my dead parents, or the fact that Darry was gonna go nowhere now because he was saddled with me and Soda, and we never talked about how Dally was gonna end up in the slammer for good one of these days.

It was Friday night, and that was cool because I didn't have to do homework, I could save it for Sunday afternoon. I had a lot of homework because I was in the advanced classes, and I was gonna get straight A's and get a scholarship, that was the plan. So I was home alone because Soda and Darry were at work, and everyone else was out screwing around. I didn't care. I was tired from school, from all the effort I put into it, for all the long term plans I had. It was exhausting always thinking about the future like that. Another plan involved not getting drafted to Vietnam, if the damn thing was still going on when I got to college. They didn't draft college students, which skewed things in favor of rich guys, but rich people had all the advantages anyway.

I saw Johnny coming up to the house and figured I'd hang out with him for awhile. I'd been brushing him off all week, and ignoring his sad eyes when he'd leave. I had to. I didn't have time to go play pool and pinball and smoke at the lot, not like he did. Johnny didn't do homework, I don't think the remedial classes he got stuck in even assigned any.

"Hey," he said, pushing open the screen door and then letting it shut with that double hollow bang it had.

"Hey," I said back, lighting up another cigarette. I had to cut down, I was just smoking altogether too much, but I was kind of a fiend when it came to cigarettes.

Johnny knew I was free to hang out since it was Friday, and I grabbed a jacket and headed out with him. We went to one of the pool halls and played some pinball, drank cokes. Lots of kids our age would drink alcohol, but not us, not usually. It isn't like we never drank ever, but we didn't make a career of it like Two-bit and Dally.

There were some drag races going on that night and we went, we both liked watching those. There were a bunch of kids milling around, laughing, talking, hoods and greasers mostly, a few of the middle class kids getting kicks on a Friday night, then we saw some socs. It was fine, they weren't bothering us in their fancy cars and nice clothes but Johnny glared at them as they went by.

When it was late and Johnny was tired he still didn't want to go home. We were just at the lot smoking away, and I was starting to cough and tossed the cigarette away. I thought about those socs we saw, thought about Johnny's darkened expression.

It all kind of converges on Johnny at night, because he has the choice of going to his house and listening to his parents fight and probably get hit, or sleeping outside or crashing at our house or somewhere. He'd get more and more miserable the later it got, and that was happening now. He was looking off to the side, his comments getting more and more negative until he said it again.

"Sometimes I just feel like killing myself,"

I couldn't take it. Jesus, I felt the pressure building up on me what with school and getting this scholarship and Darry nagging at me and my parents being dead and Johnny's screwed up situation which was making him suicidal. I couldn't take it if he killed himself, and what was stopping him? Maybe we should talk about this soc thing, maybe it would help.

"Johnny, listen to me, I'm just so tired, you know? School, Darry, all of it. I know shit is wrong with you, I know some of it and suspect the rest, but you can't kill yourself. We tried not talking about all of this and it doesn't seem to be working. Just tell me, what happened with the socs that time?"

There it was, just out there. He looked at me with this sideways glance, his eyes so dark and unreadable.

"Nothing," he said, looking down. I wanted to shake him, you always wanted to shake him. I had to get it out of him.

"Nothing? Because you never said this stuff about wanting to kill yourself before. What did they do to you?"

"I know it's hard for you, you know that, right? I know your parents don't care about you and hurt you, and I know the socs fucked you up that time, so just tell me. Please, I can't take it if you killed yourself, I want to help you somehow…just tell me what happened,"

He wouldn't, though. I could tell. He was just shutting down, shutting me out.


End file.
